On Sunday, the Atlanta Journal of Constitution published a front-page story: Workers Who Cry Foul Seldom Get a Day in Court. The story focuses on an empirical study on summary dismissal of employment discrimination claims brought in the Northern District of Georgia in 2011 and 2012. That study reveals that it is “nearly impossible to get […]
Archive | Psychology
Even Mathematically Literate People Become Innumerate when they Focus on Political Issues
At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum and Chris Mooney have interesting posts discussing a new paper by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his coauthors, which finds that even people who are generally good at interpreting statistics act as if they are innumerate when faced with data that goes against their political views. Mooney summarizes the […]
Andy Koppelman wonders: Are people who disagree with him just stupid, or are are they insane?
By David Kopel on April 1, 2012 4:48 pm in Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Health Care, Individual Mandate, Psychology, Uncategorized
For over the two years, the very intelligent and clever professors at Balkinization have been doing a great job up trying to come up with legal arguments in support of the health control law. Even people who were not persuaded by the arguments can see how they have contributed to the debate. The first item […]
What if Liberals and Libertarians Agreed on Empirical Questions?
At the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, libertarian lawprof Fernando Teson writes that “The remarkable truth of this conversation between bleeding heart libertarians and progressives is that our disagreement is exclusively empirical. If we all agree that political institutions should be arranged to alleviate poverty, then the only remaining question is which policies actually do this. […]
Paternalistic versus Therapeutic?
I finally had a chance to read the Cato Unbound symposium that Todd Z mentioned below. It’s well worth the read. I should add to my earlier post on this that I am not, as it happens, hostile to the pursuit of behavioral economics; far from it. But I do share some of the skepticism […]
Cities in Flight
Instead of a Stendhal post this week – I missed Saturday lost in the DC snow – and further to my Foundation post below, which has garnered some very interesting comments … do we have any fans of James Blish’s Cities in Flight novels? As an exercise in future history social theory, I actually think […]
“The New Foundation”
By Kenneth Anderson on January 29, 2010 11:48 pm in Literature, Popular Culture, Psychology, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Peggy Noonan notes in her weekend column that President Obama’s SOTU address worked in a name for the new program – in the tradition of the “New Deal” or Kennedy’s “New Frontier. For the Obama administration, it is the New Foundation. She is skeptical: They’ve chosen a phrase for the president’s program. They call it […]
The Psychology of a Terrorist
There seems to be a strange subtext in some press stories hinting that the suspect in the Fort Hood shootings, Nidal Malik Hasan, had psychological problems or motivations of a kind that would somehow render his acts inconsistent with terrorism or with Islamic terrorism. Does the press realize that the psychological profile of a typical […]